Dear Readers,
Good evening, and welcome to Off The Fence, a spry newsletter that comes weekly, loaded with tips, links, gossip and the odd bit of promo for our quarterly print magazine. There are many more prime cuts of Issue 16 to come, and we’re just putting Issue 17 through design at the moment, so it’s ‘all go’ around here, and there’s only one of us at the wheel this week. There’s a lot of top-tier pieces coming out soon.
If you’d like to speak to us regarding an order, please email subscriptions@the-fence.com, and your request will be attended to promptly. We are also very keen on pitches for Issue 18 and beyond – please send those through to editorial@the-fence.com. There will be more details on that below, but first, some exciting news.
Welcome, Róisín
We’re absolutely delighted to have Róisín Lanigan join the team as contributing editor. A regular writer in these pages, her masterpiece was a hunt for the Worst Tesco in London. Róisín writes regularly for broadsheets on both sides of the Atlantic, and is also an editor at i-D. Her first novel, I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There, will be published with Fig Tree in 2025. She is also very, very funny and you can follow her on Twitter here.
Festive Vibes
At the moment, we are finessing Issue 17, which takes a lot longer than you would think (ordering paper, Brexit, etc.) But we are also commissioning for Issue 18, which is the Christmas issue. Now, we don’t need Christmas-related pitches. No gift guides, please. We are really keen for: exciting, funny and brilliant pieces that will leave other publications wishing that they’d run them first. There are some more details here and the deadline for pitches for the next issue is September 14, and we’ll need copy by the end of the month. We look forward to hearing from you at editorial@the-fence.com.
What Became Of The Cat Meat Man?
One of the more successful recent works of cartographic history was the London County Council’s Bomb Damage Map, which laid out the destruction wrought on each individual street in the capital from 1939-1945. The book was beautifully put together by Thames & Hudson, but you can get a handle on the details within on this website. Sally Howard, who lives in Greenwich, has spoken to local historians about her surrounding streets, and has discovered that even though the craters have been filled in, the shadows of the bombs remain. It’s from Issue 16 and is free to read here.
Give Us Your Money, Please
On that note, it’s worth pointing out that The Fence only has one full-time member of staff, and that all other staffers are contributing a few days a month. We are continuing to offer a premium product at a bargain value, and if you’d like to help us keep growing, then you should subscribe today.
In Case You Missed It
Daisy Jones proffers an oral history of the iconic Camden store, Cyberdog.
The Sullivan Institute started off promising freedom from the nuclear family. It devolved into a grotty cult, based on the Upper West Side. James Lasdun reviews Alexander’s Stile excellent book on the sordid psychoanalysts.
Last year, Merope Mills wrote an extraordinarily moving account of the death of her 13-year-old daughter, Martha. Now, her father, Paul Laity, asks the question: can I forgive myself for my daughter’s death?
Rachel Corbett has steamed in with one of the articles of the year: on a widow’s fight against the Wildenstein family, a secretive dynasty of art collectors.
Friend of TF, Simon Childs, reports on how Vice has become a Saudi propaganda machine.
And Finally
Danny Dyer is speaking at the British Film Institute in September. That might sound a bit off to some of you: like having General Levy play out among the Sussex Downs at Glyndebourne. But the truth is that Dyer is a wildly entertaining figure, a genuinely talented actor, a Harold Pinter protegé who became a bona fide movie star with The Football Factory, and then the pin-up of the last gasp of the Lads Mag Era, before achieving stolid reliability as a mainstay on Eastenders. And a great presenter, too – calling Oswald Mosley ‘a melt’, and discovering that he, a son of Canning Town, is a direct descendant of Edward III, in what is one of the greatest moments in British television history.
Dyer is also, to use of his favourite terms, one of the greatest mugs of the 21st century: famously marking the memorial of 9/11 by tweeting: ‘Can’t believe it’s been nearly 11 years since them slags smashed into the twin towers still freaks my nut out to this day’, and embarking, in the early 2010s, on a DJing career which is somewhat less celebrated.
Danny wasn’t closing out Pacha or opening at Amnesia. His tenure behind the ones and twos occurred on the sticky floors of the country’s less glamorous boîtes, such as Tottenham’s Opera House, now, alas, shuttered. In the promo video, Dyer seems at ease in his surroundings, visibly gurning while holding a bottle of vodka and mouthing his catchphrases to the camera:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4-CcJBYBns
Excess is a constant: when playing at Rockafellas in Corby – also now closed – Dyer takes the mic, announces that ‘I’m quite off me fucking nut’ as his support DJ plays commercial techno and a percussionist chimes on in some live drums:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5f_LfDrlfQ
Of course, you rarely find yourself at a nightclub in Corby by choice, and it’s good to see Danny D fit and limber in his 47th year, and making the journey over to be celebrated at the South Bank, rather than making a lonely crawl up the A1 to Northamptonshire. At the end of the day, he’s a diamond geezer.
That’s it for this week. We’ll be back next Tuesday with more, and probably not so late in the day. We hope you enjoy the last week of summer. It’s gone quickly.
All the best,
TF